Have something to say?

Ready to be published? LXer is read by around 350,000 individuals each month, and is an excellent place for you to publish your ideas, thoughts, reviews, complaints, etc. Do you have something to say to the Linux community?

Get your private and public IP from the Linux terminal

Both for a real server, VPS or just your desktop is useful to know which IP address your Linux system is using , this can be easily seen with some command if you are directly connected to Internet via a modem or a public IP of your company, but sometimes you are behind a router, a device that forwards data packets between computer networks, creating an overlay internetwork. A router is connected to two or more data lines from different networks, and at home it’s used to “share” your ADSL that usually has 1 public IP among all your devices, that will get each a private IP. For example at my home I’ve an ADSL Wi-Fi router that I use to get Wi-Fi connection to my 3 PC, 1 smartphone and 1 tablet (android), a printer and my kindle, every device has a private IP , it’s called private because it’s not visible on the public network that can only “see” the IP of my Wi-Fi router, but now let’s see how to check your IP on your Linux computers.